Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Relocating’ Category

Wow, it’s been a long time since the last issue!

We’ve continued at about twice the level of occupancy as last year which is throwing up some shortcomings in the calculations as to how many sheets and towels we need to have. Well, mainly the problem is that we’ve been pretty much 100% full most weekends but with a different bunch of people on Saturday night than Friday night; we reckon that we need around 50% more sheets & towels than we actually have to properly cover it.

Surprisingly we’ve been on expedia for getting on for two months now and not got a single booking from them. Just as well really as there’s an awful lot of admin in keeping on top of all the bookings when we’re close to 100% occupancy seeing as we list something like 120% of our rooms. We’ve continued to get a reasonable number of bookings from our original reservation system listing of last July and are getting most of the new ones from a couple of places that looked like they’d be minor fill-in sites.

Just over 7000km on the car so far.

Some **** pinched our trailer last month. If nothing else, it pushed us into buying the new one that we were needing and it’s heaps better than the last one. Wendy reckons that there’s a fair to middling chance that we’ll see someone driving around with the old trailer at some stage as it had UK plates so they’re probably thinking that we were just tourists.

Just starting to recover from our wedding booking yesterday. We’ve an absolute mountain of food leftover and will probably have to do one of our “bin runs” today to get rid of some of it as even the restaurant size bins aren’t up to taking it all. Everything went really well though the 4am finish was a teensy bit late. After a very late breakfast we managed to get rid of the last of the overnighters around noon and only have two rooms occupied tonight. That could well change rapidly as we had to turn away 6 or 7 people who turned up last night.

Still no car which is a major bummer. It’s supposed to be here next week.

We’ve now arrived in the big time with our listing on expedia. I only worked out how we got onto it last week. It seems that in the course of one of my marketing onslaughts earlier in the year I followed up who does the hotels for AirFrance and it’s an outfit I’d never heard of called WWTE who are actually expedia/hotels.com. Interestingly, if we’d applied to expedia directly, they’d have turned us down as we’d need to have 30 rooms but apply via WWTE and this restriction isn’t applied.

I’d forgotten all about hotelconnect who used to be the people behind FlyBE’s hotels but were dumped earlier in the year. Anyway, they actually call out to see you so our application has effectively been lying around for months. The guy turned up during the week and reckons that we’ll be on around mid-July. Although they don’t look after any airline flying into Perpignan, I think we’ll do quite well from their listing as they do most of their sales through travel agents which is an area we’d always wanted to get into. Also, they reckon that another airline is about to start flights into Perpignan and they’re looking for more hotels to service that.

We’ve finally started to get bookings from bookings.net . Just a couple so far but it’s a start.

Due to a slight lull before the summer kicks in I’ve finally managed to make a proper start on getting the winery/vineyard website. It’s not online yet but mark 1 should be within a week or two. We’ll probably move into online sales not too long after that as they already do mail order next door (only to France though).

Yet another “all building” booking rolled in last night. A travelling theatre group (“la Compagnie Les Affranchis”) is staying for a couple of nights (see http://www.ccas.fr/tcult/spectacle.php?ref=156).

We’ve had all kinds of car problems over the last couple of months with the Toyota which is now dead in the car park with no cooling system, in need of a new radiator, lacking a braking function and with very dodgy suspension following a pickup of rather heavy guests a few weeks back. We think that a couple of thousand euro will sort it out but we’re leaving it to the one side at the moment as we hope to trade it in against something like a Landrover at some stage in the not too distant future.

So, we’ve bought a new Suzuki Alto as our “2nd” car from Stockauto for 7500‚€ or so (yes, £5000 brand new!) and we think it’s now sitting in Paris (have to confirm this tomorrow). We’re currently working out how to get up there economically to collect it. The train is about 90‚€ which is notionally the cheapest way but requires an overnight stay in Paris which’ll bump up the cost. Airfrance is 260‚€ one way (really!) or 47‚€ if I bring John along (they have a “family travelling together” discount and he gets to go free), both plus about 30‚€ taxes ie around 90‚€ but there’d be another 10‚€ or so to get me into Paris. Renting a car is about 10‚€0 (if you’re renting one, www.PerpignanFlightsAndCarhire.com is the cheapest way to do it worldwide) plus maybe 40‚€ in petrol and 10‚€ in taxes (ie about 150‚€).

Following our little marketing onslaught about two months ago, we’re now live on www.activehotels.com,  www.bookings.net and www.travelextras.com and have received no bookings from any of them! We’re nearly live on Gullivers and Expedia which hopefully will do somewhat better.

No more word from the telly people but they appear to be running behind schedule a bit so who knows?

We’ve just received our first reservation in German. That’ll teach me to get bits of the site into languages I can’t understand!

Roy’ll be happy to hear that we’re finally getting the rugby traffic. There’s some match on July 8th and we’re almost completely full that weekend as a result of that. Wendy’s worried that they’ll all be wanting transfers to the match which will take a while in the Suzuki – three people a go means over five trips already and that’s just counting the people that we know are going to the match.

Yes, folks it is now one year since we arrived here. Well, one year and a bit as we arrived at 7pm local time.

A year ago, we’d no reservations in the book and didn’t know that our first customers would be turning up in a few days time. Now we’ve a smattering of reservations right through to September. A year ago we managed one nights occupancy over Easter; this year 38.

A year ago, we’d hardly any furniture for our own rooms. And we still haven’t!

A year ago, we’d just missed appearing on Living the Dream. Now we don’t know yet if we’ll be in the No Going Back series.

A year ago, I was getting into the shorts & sandles “uniform” that I’d keep up ’til November. Yup, just broke out the “uniform” a few days ago… 32C in the shade this afternoon and I’m a bit sunburnt.

A year ago, I was pretty sure that I’d fail the French diploma. Now I’ve got Dip French after my name and am making a respectable start on the Dip Spanish.

A year ago, ‘yall said you’d be here… and none of you have arrived yet! No, Dorothy, I haven’t forgotten your reservation in September.

A year ago, we didn’t know how quickly we could get to the clinic. We found out on August 29th when John decided that he’d had enough. Or was it Wendy?

A year ago, we thought we were crazy to have bought a hotel in France. Now we’re even crazier and have started looking for the next place!

A year ago, we were wondering if the French bureaucracy was as bad as everyone made it out to be. Now we know that it’s even worse than that.

A year ago, we didn’t know that we’d be having to make over 300 beds over the following 12 months. Now we’re looking forward to making over 500 in the next 12 months.

Just got our car back from the garage. It packed in on the way to Spain on Monday so we’ve been walking everywhere this week. All being well, we’ll be attempting the run to Spain again on Monday.

Now that we’ve hit the anniversary, we are getting going on selling the house in Holywood. So, if you want an immaculate, spacious two bedroom house with newly fitted luxury bathroom, cabled for BT, NTL and Sky, near to all local amenities and with excellent transport links, you know where to look.

We’re starting to get a fair number of hits on our Dutch pages which is a good sign, though generally speaking the Dutch tend to search in English. It was a doddle to get the pages translated (I’m sure the Dutch is dreadful though!) and I’m planning on doing the same exercise for Portuguese over the next week or so (so far we’ve had nobody from Portugal at all so perhaps this will pull in a few punters). It’s certainly a bit weird to have our dutch transport page listed as number one when you search for “ryanair girona” in google.nl !

I’m still plugging away with the winery/vineyard site, aiming to add a couple of photos a month of their activities during the year. The direct hits on both pages are starting to mount up as the pages get larger and the ranking is definitely up there: search for “winery perpignan” and it’s the top listed site! We’re wondering when we’ll get the first order via the site (they’re already getting phone calls originating from it).

Now that this year’s website refresh is nearing completion, I thought that I’d put a toe in the water and see if I can pull in any webdesign business from other people, so as of last week, Crystal Consultancy made its debut. It’ll only be a winter-time activity though as we get too many customers from about June to September to be able to do anything other than the hotel. Amazingly, there are only 31 webdesigners listed for the whole of France so we’ll likely pull in a few punters (that’s down to most people only using automated submission to the search engines so I’m sure the real number is much higher). The site’s live now and should be listed by google within the next couple of days with yahoo following a few weeks later.

The Spanish course is going fine so far. I try to do it each morning before doing anything else. If nothing else, the Spanish from years ago seems to be coming back to me in bits & pieces.

We had a run to Herault (near Montpellier) during the week to see our new accountant. She’s pointed out another bunch of mistakes that our soon to be former accountant had made over the course of the year. A “just in passing” remark of hers highlighted just how bad he was: he managed to register us in a way that wouldn’t have let us employ part-time staff which is the only way we’d have probably been employing people. On a much more serious note, due to him having done nothing at all following the initial meeting in February (in spite of him having quite a long “to-do” list), the mortgage cannot be treated as a business expense. We’re not sure of the full implications of this as it only sunk in after we’d left but I think that it means that every single mortgage payment we’ve made over the last year will count as income and therefore be subject to tax; if that’s right it will inflate the cost of the mortgage by something like 50%. The only way around that would seem to be to reregister the ownership of the place in the French equivalent of “Mas Camps Ltd” but then that’s going to run up something like EUR 20,000 in notary fees (well, mostly transfer tax).

Anyway, we’ve sent a note off to the soon to be former accountant informing him that due to the mistakes he has made, we no longer require his services and will be calling to collect our file from him on Monday afternoon. I suspect that we’ll be seeing him in court at some point to recoup the money that has been lost as a consequence of his incompetence.

The weather here seems to be starting to get back to normal. It was raining quite a lot over the last week but when it isn’t it’s very warm: definitely t-shirt weather and verging on shorts weather. Going by what the neighbours were saying the other day, this month is a bit hit & miss weather-wise but next month sees a more consistent improvement.

We’re going to have another go for the TVs this week. There’s an offer on at the moment which’ll let us pick them up for 69‚€ so we’re going to pick up five or possibly six of them (although I think that we’ll pick up one or two as a trial first). At the moment, two of the rooms are wired for French/Spanish TV and we have the bits & pieces to put satellite TV in one other room. However, we know that we can extend satellite TV to one other room quite easily. The gite and room 5 are problems though and we think that we’ll have to cable them up specially due to the thickness of the walls.